The Czech government will buy a pig farm now on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp, and replace it with a memorial.
Culture Minister Daniel Herman said on Monday that the farm’s owner will sign a deal soon, with the government approving a spend of 450 million koruna on the plan.
Activists for Roma and rights groups have long demanded the removal of the farm at Lety, 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Prague, where some 1,300 Czech Roma were sent by the Nazis during World War II.
In all, 327 Roma, including 241 children, died at the camp staffed by an ethnic Czech commander and guards, while more than 500 were sent to Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied southern Poland.
The communist Czechoslovakian regime built the pig farm on the site in the 1970s.
Of the roughly one million Roma who lived in Europe prior to the Second World War, historians believe that Nazi Germany killed over half.
